Being able to automatically remove the skin from the animal parts is of great importance to the food processing industry. Generally, high amounts of saturated fat are found in animal skin. Therefore health conscious consumers prefer skinless meat products, especially skinless poultry products. Furthermore, as removing the skin from the animal part is generally a tedious process, and due to today's convenience society, there is an increasing demand for purchasing animal meat skinless and ready to cook.
Various methods and apparatuses have been developed for removing skin from animal parts. Typically these methods and apparatuses involve feeding an animal part into a skin remover unit. The skin remover unit may include a knife blade, a hold-down roller, a gripper roller, and a stripper roller. The animal part may be feed manually or by means of a conveyer belt into the skin remover unit. The hold-down roller pushes down on the animal part to ensure that the gripper roller grips the skin of the animal part and guides the animal part in respect of the knife blade. The knife blade separates the skin from the animal part, and the gripper roller pulls the detached skin away from the animal part. The detached skin may fall from the gripper roller, or be removed by the stripper roller.
Usually, the skin remover unit is a separate animal part processing station, and operators are manually required to transport the animal parts to the location of the skin remover unit. If animal parts are fed by conveyer belt into the skin remover unit, the animal parts have most likely already been deboned and the animal part may need to be reoriented by an operator to ensure that the best skinning results are achieved.
Accordingly, there is a growing demand for methods and apparatuses that incorporate the automatic skin removal step into food processing lines. Hence, it is an object of the present invention to propose an improved method and apparatus of mechanically removing skin from animal parts in an inline food processing method or apparatus. In a more general sense it is an object of the present invention to overcome or ameliorate at least one of the disadvantages of the prior art. It is also an object of the present invention to at least provide alternative processes and structures that are less cumbersome in use and which can be provided and used relatively inexpensively. At any rate the present invention is at the very least aimed at offering a useful choice and contribution to the existing art.